Nearly every city in the country has a section of its zoning code that tells builders how much parking they must provide. The numbers are oddly specific. Two spaces per apartment. One space per bedroom. One space for every three restaurant seats. One for every 250 square feet of office. These figures were copied city to city starting in the middle of the last century, and most of them were never based on a study of local demand. They were based on what a neighboring city had already written down, which had been copied from somewhere else before that.
The cost of complying is not small. A surface parking spot typically runs somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 dollars once you count the land, paving, drainage, and striping. Put that spot inside a structured garage and the figure climbs to somewhere in the range of 25,000 to 50,000 dollars. Go underground, which is what happens on a tight urban lot, and it can pass 50,000 easily. Now apply a two space requirement to a 40 unit building. The parking alone can add several million dollars to a project before a single apartment gets framed, and that cost does not disappear. It gets spread across the rent roll.
That is the part the conversation usually misses. When rents rise, the blame goes to developers, to investors, to interest rates, or to people moving in from somewhere else. Some of that is fair. But a portion of the rent on a new building is a line item that a city council wrote into the code decades ago and that no one has voted on since. The tenant who does not own a car pays that line item at the same rate as the tenant with two. The requirement does not ask whether you need the space. It only asks how many units are in the building.
The requirement also kills projects that never make the news. A small lot in a walkable neighborhood might support a dozen apartments, but if the code demands 24 parking spaces, there is no geometry that fits. The building does not get built smaller. It does not get built at all, or it gets built as something with fewer, larger, more expensive units that can carry the cost. Every corner store, small apartment building, and neighborhood restaurant that pencils out everywhere except the parking math is a project the rule quietly removed from the supply.
Cities have started testing the alternative. Buffalo dropped its minimums citywide in 2017 and became the first major American city to do it. Hartford followed the same year, Minneapolis in 2021, San Jose in 2022, Austin in 2023, and Oregon eliminated them near transit statewide. California removed minimums for anything within a half mile of major transit. Researchers who studied Buffalo afterward found that roughly half of major developments in the following years built less parking than the old rule would have forced, with the biggest reductions in mixed use projects near transit. Nobody was banned from building parking. They built what they judged the tenants would actually use.
The objection deserves a fair hearing, because it is not imaginary. Remove the requirement and some residents will park on the street, and in a neighborhood with tight curb space that is a real annoyance for people who live there. Not every neighborhood has transit worth walking to, and in a lot of American cities a car is not optional. Accessible parking is a separate matter and stays mandated under federal law regardless of what the zoning code says. Anyone arguing to drop minimums should be honest that curb management, permit districts, and metered pricing become necessary work rather than optional, and that the cities doing it well are doing that work.
The honest framing is that this is a choice about who pays. Under a minimum, everyone in the building pays for parking through rent, including the people who never use it. Without one, the builder decides how much to provide and can price it separately, so the tenant with two cars pays for two spaces and the tenant with none does not. The second arrangement is not anti car. It just stops hiding the cost inside a rent check. Housing is expensive for a long list of reasons and this is only one of them, but it is among the few that a city council can change in an afternoon with a vote nobody would even have to campaign on.
